​Participants spent five nights at the Rossmount Inn, a 3-storey manor house on an 87 acre estate set between the forest and the sea. It includes Chamcook Mountain, the highest point in the Passamaquoddy Bay area, and has breathtaking vistas over the Bay, Chamcook Lake, St. Croix River and the coast of Maine.

The Rossmount Inn has been featured in “Where to Eat in Canada” for the past five years, and Chef Chris Aerni, who received his traditional chef’s training in Switzerland, is renowned for his gourmet meals created with local, seasonal, organic and wild foods. There are beautiful nature trails directly behind the Inn, and it is only a few minutes from St. Andrews By-the-Sea, recently named USA Today's Top Canadian Destination.

​

​Your Educator and Writer in Residence

Gerard Collins is a New Brunswick-based writer, originally from Newfoundland, whose first novel,Finton Moon, was nominated for the 2014 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, 2013 Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, the 2014 NL Heritage and History Award, and has won the Percy Janes First Novel Award. His short story collection,Moonlight Sketches, won the 2012 NL Book Award.

Gerard has won numerous arts and letters awards for fiction, published in journals and anthologies, garnered unanimously positive reviews and arts grants, had his short stories taught in multiple university courses, and his first novel has been placed in high school learning resource centres across Newfoundland and Labrador.

A lecturer at Memorial University for nearly two decades and an occasional lecturer at University of New Brunswick, Gerard has a Ph.D. in American (Gothic) literature. He has recently hosted creative writing retreats in Ireland (2017), Lunenburg (2016), and Saint John, NB (2016), among others. A featured workshop leader at both the 2015 and 2016 WFNB Wordspring, Gerard was also faculty at the 2014 Piper's Frith retreat in Newfoundland and has led workshops across Atlantic Canada and Europe, including a recent invitation to lecture Masters in Creative Writing students at Newcastle University, UK.

Gerard regularly serves on juries of writing and granting competitions while mentoring poets and writers who show great promise. Gerard lives in a cottage beside a lake in southern New Brunswick where he teaches university courses by distance and is writing both a new short story collection and a novel.